Abstract
Neural Weather Models (NWM) are novel data-driven weather forecasting
tools based on neural networks that have recently achieved comparable
deterministic forecast skill to current operational approaches using
significantly less real-time computational resources. The short
inference times required by NWMs allow the generation of a large
ensemble potentially providing benefits in quantifying the forecast
uncertainty, particularly for extreme events, which is of critical
importance for various socio-economic sectors. Here we propose a novel
ensemble design for NWMs spanning two main sources of uncertainty:
epistemic —or model uncertainty,— and aleatoric —or initial
condition uncertainty. For the epistemic uncertainty, we propose an
effective strategy for creating a diverse ensemble of NWMs that captures
uncertainty in key model parameters. For the aleatoric, we explore the
“breeding of growing modes” for the first time on NWMs, a technique
traditionally used for operational numerical weather predictions as an
estimate of the initial condition uncertainty. The combination of these
two types of uncertainty produces an ensemble of NWM-based forecasts
that is shown to improve upon benchmark probabilistic NWM and is
competitive with the 51-member ensemble of the European Centre for
Medium-Range Weather Forecasts based on the Integrated Forecasting
System (IFS) —a gold standard in weather forecasting,— in terms of
both error and calibration. In addition, we report better probabilistic
skill than the IFS over land for two key variables: surface wind and air
surface temperature.